From the right: The Reagan Right’s Summer of Sorrow
This has been “an especially cruel season” for Reagan conservatives with the deaths of Charles Krauthammer and John McCain, laments The Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis. It just underscores the fact that “what used to be a thoughtful, courageous and honorable brand of conservatism has metastasized into a more vulgar, populist and anti-intellectual party.” Both men, he notes, “had a moral compass” — having endured physical ordeals “that might have broken lesser men, only to later achieve greatness in another field.” At the end, “both men knew they were dying of cancer, yet took on their fate with dignity and elan.” Simply put, “one would be hard-pressed to underestimate the significance or the vacuum left by this one-two punch to American politics.”
Security beat: Ignore Jimmy Carter on Assad Sanctions
Jimmy Carter’s name may once have been “synonymous with human rights,” but as David Adesnik notes at The Hill, he’s now demanding that the US and the West “lift their sanctions on the Assad regime.” Carter suggests the Syrian strongman “may be capable of rising above the blood-drenched policies of the past seven years,” so why not test him? The answer, replies Adesnik, “lies in the 55,000 images from Assad’s torture chambers captured by a Syrian military photographer.” How could “a former president who declared human rights to be ‘the soul of my foreign policy’ . . . possibly believe that Assad is anything but an unrepentant war criminal?” Fact is, “reconciliation and re-engagement with Assad will only reward him for his atrocities,” not promote change.
Culture critic: Church’s Warring Factions Must Unite
The shocking accusations by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano implicating high-ranking Vatican officials in a cover-up of clerical sexual abuse “amounts to an open declaration of war between the church’s liberalizing and traditionalist factions,” declares The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle. But “this isn’t the first time that clerical-abuse scandals have become a proxy battle in that doctrinal war.” Both sides have used them as “evidence to support their views”: modernizers for an end to clerical celibacy; conservatives for “the dangers of tolerating homosexuality.” Yet the best evidence suggests that “both sides are wrong.” And while Vigano may have an agenda, his accusations can’t be dismissed out of hand. But for an inquiry to work, “everyone will need to decide that their common interest in vanquishing abusive clergy outweighs their common fears about losing the wider war.”
Urban wonk: Schools Chancellor’s Fixated on Race
Richard Carranza may have been New York City’s schools chancellor for only five months, but that’s long enough to realize he’s “obsessed with ethnicity, yet indifferent to academic performance,” asserts Bob McManus at City Journal. Worse, “he seems oblivious to the dangers embedded in racialized public-education policies — as does the man who hired him,” Mayor de Blasio. Problem is, New York’s schools “in general are a mess.” And neither de Blasio “nor the de facto commander of the classrooms, United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew, seems to care much.” But “sorting through the dysfunctionalities and institutional resistance to accountability that produce failed schools in the first place” has “no place” in their toolbox, so it’s easier “to blame ‘segregation.’ ”
Feminist: Too Much, Too Soon for #MeToo Comebacks
Ousted “Today” show anchor Matt Lauer says he’s plotting his TV return. And comedian Louis CK this week got a standing ovation even before beginning his first performance since being outed as a sexual harasser. The Cut’s Rebecca Traister suggests this sense of entitlement to reviving their careers reaffirms “the false notion that their worth, their value, their indispensability was built independently of the systems that permitted them to abuse their power in the first place.” But their victims “don’t have mansions to retreat to; and their punishment wasn’t not sitting in a VIP seat at the Hamptons Classic, which was the actual level of personal abasement for Lauer over the weekend.” Says Traister: “A guy who really wanted to change and regain the public’s trust might do it by reentering public life via another avenue.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann